A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably.
An elegantly written multigenerational novel set in 19th- and early-20th-century Syria.
Khalifa, the most prominent Syrian writer at work today (albeit in exile), opens with a scarifying moment from history: a 1907 flood that swept away a small town along the Euphrates River. There are few survivors. Two are friends, the Christian Hanna Gregoros and the Muslim Zakariya Bayazidi, both of whom were away at the time; of those at home, only Bayazidi’s wife, Shaha Sheikh Musa, and Mariana Nassar lived through the flood. The destruction is total, and both friends lose their sons. For his part, “Hanna felt like the flood hadn’t just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and uproarious past, his entire life.” Sordid it was, and Bayazidi, less inclined to repentance, was only too glad to take part in the brothel visits and drunken nights that, even before the flood, Hanna was tiring of, although he had committed to building a citadel of sin with, as Bayazidi says, “a stage especially for suicides.” With a star-crossed artist friend named William Eisa, their Xanadu on the Euphrates grows until the disaster changes everything, whereupon Mariana takes a more central role in the story. It’s not the first catastrophe to have struck the village, as Khalifa writes, taking the friends to their childhood a quarter-century earlier and a massacre of Christians by the Ottoman government; nor will it be the last, as plague and famine strike and religious fundamentalism hardens, foreshadowing the horrors that have beset Syria in our own time. The Syria Khalifa evokes is one where Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs overlook their differences to forge friendships and family ties; and although his storyline sometimes wanders between seemingly disconnected episodes, the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a “kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die.”
A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780374601928
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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